Monthly Archives: August 2018

There are many colored rock formations – especially red ones – around the world. The most famous are the red rocks of Utah and Arizona, and Uluru in Australia. Less famous are ones for example in different parts of China, like in Zhangye. But most of them become brightly colored only when there’s a low sun either at dawn or dusk – or when Photoshop is used for digital color boosting. On Kamchatka on the other hand there’s a place where red rocks glow brightly all day – not just in the mornings and evenings. That place is the volcano named Koshelev:

Wow. Orange, white, green… – scenes serene you could gawp at for hours…

Read on…

— ‘So, how did you spend the summer?’
— ‘First – up in the mountains.’
— ‘And then?’
— ‘In plaster!’

Hi folks!

It’s been a while hasn’t it? Perhaps one of the longest ever stints away from my cherished blog. But with this post I am clearly back and raring to go, so, without further ado, let’s get this re-fired up…

And what better way to fire things up than a first installment of tales from the volcanic side, which also happen to be from the far-eastern seaboard-of-Russia side – that is, from Kamchatka!

Now, I have to admit that this was not – by far – the most outstanding of my many trips to the peninsula. One key factor was the weather this year; while Europe was having possibly one of its finest summers ever weather-wise, over in Kamchatka the weather was truly terrible. All the same, as ever, there’s still plenty to tell and show (photographically) you.

Oh my Gorely! It turns out this trip was my sixth to Kamchatka (not including a brief stay in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on our way to the Kurils in 2014). The first was back in 2006. Then again in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015. And it won’t be the last time either; for Kamchatka, still, IMHO, is the most glorious place on the planet – even more so than New Zealand!

All righty. Today’s episode: Beach-walking tourism.

Tourism comes in all shapes and sizes. There are lazy beach holidays (or not so lazy if you’ve got the kids with you:); there are the more (grown-up) cultural holidays featuring museums, ruins, monasteries and other such historical attractions; there are shopping holidays… all of which are very popular with the masses. There are oceangoing holidays – be they exclusive affairs on expensive yachts with a helicopter on the deck or the more democratic huge ocean-liner-based ones. Then there are road trips on which you simply look around at the passing surrounding geography – that’s also tourism.

But here I’ll be telling you about a different kind of tourism: the kind during which you need to use your legs a lot with all the walking and climbing, and have a backpack on your shoulders carrying warm clothes, cameras and batteries, some snacks to keep you going for the next few hours or days, and sometimes even a tent. This is tourism of the hiking-trekking vibe, involving mountains, sometimes sports, sometimes volcanoes… normally requiring of the participating tourist both experience and training (sometimes you can do without both experience and training if the difficulty/distance level isn’t so tough).

Sporty walking, skiing, climbing, river/lake/sea/ocean-based tourism – there’s plenty to go at. But there’s one more you may not have heard of: beach-walking tourism! No, I don’t mean walking across a beach to your preferred spot for a spot of sunbathing-cocktailing-reading, and I don’t mean walking to the beach-volleyball court either. I’m talking when you trek for miles upon miles with a heavy backpack along a very long beach. Kinda like this:

Read on…

Fairy tales and fantasy stories have long dispelled the myth about the invincibility of global storybook power brokers and villains (as for us, for more than 20 years we’ve been busting the very same myth in cyberspace). Every Voldemort relies on security of his diary, his ring, his snake, his… well, I guess you know all about the Horcruxes. And the success of your war on villainy, whether fairytale or virtual, depends on two key qualities: perseverance and intellect (meaning technology). Today I will tell you how perseverance and intellect, plus neural networks, machine learning, cloud security and expert knowledge — all built into our products — will keep you protected against potential future cyberthreats.

In fact, we have covered the technologies for protection against future cyberthreats before (more than once, a lot more than once, and even for laughs). Why are we so obsessed with them, you may wonder.

It’s because these technologies are exactly what makes robust protection different from fake artificial intelligence and products that use stolen information to detect malware. Identifying the code sequence using a known signature after the malware has already sneaked into the system and played its dirty tricks on the user? No one needs that. “A poultice on a wooden leg,” so to say.

But anticipating cybervillains’ patterns of thought, apprehending the vulnerabilities they’ll find attractive, and spreading invisible nets capable of automatic, on-the-spot detection — only a few industry players are capable of that, sad but true. In fact, very few, according to independent tests. WannaCry, the decade’s largest epidemic, is a case in point: Thanks to System Watcher technology, our products have proactively protected our users against this cyberattack.

The key point is: One cannot have too much future cyberthreat protection. There is no emulator or big-data expert analysis system able to cover all of the likely threat vectors. Invisible nets should cover every level and channel as much as they can, keeping track of all objects’ activities on the system, to make sure they have no chance ever to cause trouble, while maintaining minimum use of resources, zero “false positives,” and one hundred percent compatibility with other applications to avoid blue screens of death.

The malware industry keeps developing, too. Cybervillains have taught (and continue to teach) their creations to effectively conceal themselves in the system: to change their structure and behavior, to turn to “unhurried” action modes (minimize the use of computing resources, wake up on schedule, lie low right after penetrating the target computer, etc.), to dive deep into the system, to cover up their traces, to use “clean” or “near-clean” methods. But where there is a Voldemort, there are also Horcruxes one can destroy to end his malicious being. The question is how to find them.

A few years ago, our products beefed up their arsenal of proactive technologies for protection against advanced cyberthreats by adopting an interesting invention (patent RU2654151). It employs a trainable objects behavior model for high-accuracy identification of suspicious anomalies in the system, source localization and suppression even of the most “prudent” of worms.

Read on…